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The Harry Potter author celebrates her 51st birthday today - and she is an online force to be reckoned with, says Rebecca Hawkes

Remember when JK Rowling was a “millionaire recluse”? Back in the late Nineties/early 2000s, when her bestselling Harry Potter novels first propelled her into the limelight, the author – who turns 51 today – was portrayed as something of a JD Salinger figure: a fiercely solitary woman, emerging for the rare book signing, but otherwise jealously guarding her privacy.

Yet by all accounts, and judging by her frustrated comments in interviews from the time, Rowling was nothing of the sort. Instead, she was simply trying to live as ordinary a life as possible, and ensure some protection for her daughter, Jessica, whom she was then raising alone (the author has since remarried and had two more children). Indeed, the fact that she took the time to individually answer thousands of fan letters – often by hand – was testament enough to the fact that she wasn’t intentionally remaining aloof.

Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson

Nonetheless, there was still a sense of distance. Rowling was a writer we loved, but, if we felt a connection, it was perhaps more with the author’s characters – orphan hero Harry, kind, wise Dumbledore and bookish-but-brave Hermione – than with their creator.

Fifteen years or so on, this is no longer the case. Back in 2000, the author told The Times that she was planning to drift into “blissful obscurity” after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, which eventually took place in 2007. Instead, she’s more famous than ever: throwing herself into politics (she was a vocal Labour supporter during the last election), taking up various charitable causes, and communicating with fans on a day-to-day basis.

But the magic spell that unlocked the author, allowing her to speak directly to her readers, wasn’t “Alohomora”, but the social media platform Twitter. Rowling might publish all her new writing on Sony’s Pottermore site, but it’s on Twitter that she arguably has the most impact: she has well over five million followers, and receives thousands of retweets a day.

Crucially, one of the key factors behind her enduring online popularity is the fact that, in her public persona, she appears to espouse values identical to those which permeate her books. Hermione Granger valiantly fought for the rights of house elves, the oppressed underdogs of the wizarding world; her creator speaks up for the rights of – well, just about anyone who needs speaking up for. Isolated gay teens, Eastern European orphans, struggling single mothers, children battling cancer, anyone living in poverty, the BBC … the list goes on and on. If you're a fan of the world-view tacitly expressed in the Potter books, you'll very likely approve of some of Rowling's real-life activities.

Turns out people all over the world are pretty perplexed as to why our government would want to mess with the @BBC.

Perhaps the author's greatest online asset, however, is her sense of humour and her sharpness . After all, she didn’t just create heroes like Harry and Dumbledore. She’s also the woman who gave us the fantastically loathsome Dursleys, the hideously small-minded Mollisons of The Casual Vacancy, and, in her Robert Galbraith detective novel The Silkworm, one of the most meticulously scathing portraits of the publishing world ever committed to print.

Warm, kind, funny Rowling is one thing – but angry, politicised Rowling is an online force to be reckoned with.

After some particularly nasty online commenters decided to object to the casting of Noma Dumuzweni in stageplay Harry Potter and The Cursed Child (written by Jack Thorne and based on an original story by Rowling), the author was quick to put them in their place.' And in 2015, when a online commenter decided it was appropriate to share his opinion that tennis player Serena Williams is “built like a man”, the author responded with a picture of Williams in a fitted red dress, and the pithy retort: "Yeah, my husband looks just like this in a dress. You're an idiot".

So much for “blissful obscurity”. It seems that public Rowling – biting, witty, outspoken and passionate – is here to stay. We couldn’t be happier.